


The Fire In Us

by theskywasblue



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2010-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rasetsunyo gives her son a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fire In Us

Her son is exhausted. Rasetsunyo can see it in the way he carries himself, the awful tremor in his shoulders as he holds his stance and his father calls for the three guards – there are three this time, there could be, will be, more the next time, for each session is a test and at the first sign of weakness Kougaiji will be punished – to attack once again. She knows he cannot continue to withstand the onslaught, not indefinitely. He can only hope to keep them at bay long enough to out-last his father’s sickening amusement.

Rasetsunyo bites her lip, says a silent prayer to the gods – she is not sure they hear her now, or have ever heard her before – and watches as her son’s step falters, as one of his opponents lands a blow that staggers him, and as a blade comes out to rest cool against his throat.

“Enough!” Gyumaoh snarls, and the guards scatter like frightened rabbits to the edges of the courtyard, thankful that they are not the ones left kneeling in the dirt this time – for they are punished just as harshly, if not more for their own failures. Rasetsunyo’s heart aches, but she cannot stay to witness her son’s humiliation and retreats instead into the castle, where she will not have to see or hear, only imagine, which is in its own way infinitely worse. On her way she passes a figure in the shadows that she refuses to acknowledge.

In her wake, Gyokumen Koushu stands looking out at the courtyard, watching Gyumaoh discipline his son, and strokes her swollen belly.

* * *

Kougaiji winces, turns his head against the pillow as the physician tends the wounds on his back and shoulders. Rasetsunyo sits at the head of the bed and strokes her son’s soft hair. She forces herself to look at the wounds the whip has made across her son’s back and lets her hatred for her husband turn into a hard ball in the pit of her stomach. The wounds in her son’s flesh will heal, though they will scar. The wounds in her heart will remain open.

_You will not forgive him this_ she tells herself calmly, _no mother should forgive this._

When the physician leaves them, Kougaiji is sweating, pale. She lays one hand atop his and continues to stroke his hair until he sleeps.

She may be a woman only, but she is strong, and the sight of the blood-soaked bandages across her son’s back turns her resolve to steel.

* * *

She had always known Gyomaoh had a wandering eye. There was much talk in her father’s court of his insatiable appetites – though he was the lesser of many evils, especially when compared to Hyakuganmaoh and others in the East. She had always braced herself for the inevitability of his betrayal of their marriage bed. And she was thankful in some respects, to have his attention diverted.

But now that Gyokumen Koushu, favourite of all her sometimes-husband’s many concubines, is with child, there is an urgency to Rasetsunyo’s existence. The child threatens her son’s one saving grace, that he is Gyumaoh’s only son, and thereby spared the full extent of his wrath. It is Rasetsunyo’s saving grace as well, to be the mother of that son, no matter how inadequate Gyumaoh has found him since the very day of his birth.

But if Gyokumen Koushu bears a son, Rasetsunyo knows, her own son will lose all his father’s favour, what little there is to be had. She fears that loss more than anything, fears seeing more blood on her son’s back, more pain in his beautiful, jewel-hued eyes. Eyes he shares with his mother, and her father; with generations of a lineage he will never be permitted to know.

She cannot trust the gods to guard her son.

Among the few possessions she was allowed to take with her from her home, years ago when she was still a girl and still believed she might come to one day love the man who was to be her husband, is an ancient scroll, trusted to generations of her family, containing a power so ancient it is hardly a memory until summoned by the person to whom it is bound. It is on this scroll that Rasetsunyo writes her son’s name in blood she carefully takes onto her fingertip from his still raw wounds as he sleeps – _Kougaiji, son of Rasetsunyo_, for one moment obliterating his paternity in a way she only wishes she could – giving to him the one thing she hopes may preserve his life, even if it means giving up her only source of power.

She prays again, as the moon rises outside her son’s bedroom window, though not to the gods.

_May the fire protect my son, guard his life, preserve his soul..._

-End-


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